“The bad time comes” writes Doris Lessing, “and we don’t know why.” Lately it’s been the bad time. Some of the steady and walkable ground around me has done some crumpling. It’s a mixture of small and large things: An overtiredness, a misunderstanding, one friend is diagnosed as terminally ill, another has a nervous breakdown, then there is a note telling why our concierge went home one night and blew his head off, and suddenly a lot of earth starts shifting. People are leaving – life, Louvain, each other; people are dying, people are breaking down, friendships and marriages are crumpling, and all around there is illness, death, fear, and pretense and silence. I sat myself down the other day, it was my birthday no less, to ponder this heaviness and to ponder my own steady and foolish self – me, so steady in my foolishness and so foolish in my steadiness.

Life, it would seem, has its seasons. Our hearts, interwoven with spring and autumn, winter and summer, beat warm, then heavy, and our moods would follow the flow of the sea. It’s all so complex, beyond us, and yet so simple: An eternal rhythm, a repetition, living then dying, and then, a break in the rhythm, a surprising freshness, living anew. It’s a mystery, a wonder, so unbelievable, this life! Day in and day out we feel its many joys, and, underneath them all, there is the sheer exultation in being alive, in using our bodies and minds in loving, of sensing, in eating, in being. We call it health. The sun shines and we feel well, and we neither ask nor know why. We are at peace. The ground we walk is steady, full of innocence. We grin and there is confidence. The human game seems unfair. We sense it is less fair for some others, and an all-too-easy compassion flows from us as we feel for life’s wounded and it’s fragile.

But the bad time comes, and we don’t know why; almost as if a too bright sun inevitable brings on clouds. A sadness catches us and, as if gazing from a ship which is suddenly tossed by an unexpected wave, our horizon abruptly changes. Things darken, health becomes fragile, as does friendship, and reality changes complexion. We sense how unlovable we are and begin to believe that no one loves us. The slightest things now give us reason to complain, to be jealous, to reproach. The very world looks different. The innocent eyes, the bold cheeks, the confident grin – the human face, so radiant – now radiates need, guilt, the tear, and we walk and wander, talk and tire, among small and large lies, trusting the cry of the child no more than that of the hawker. Everyone, it would seem, has their angle. Three billion faces, lives, loves, hearts, potential smiles, stained yet beautiful – the treasures of our human race – pass by, our eyes embrace, one, then another: Who, we have to wonder, keeps them all close and dear?

We scan the faces, each a mirror, and there is the dampening fear that perhaps nothing holds us near. Our eyes drop and, imprisoned in self-focus, we wonder why Beethoven went deaf and why fate takes these strange delights. Why is it this way? We don’t understand. What huge impersonal forces rip through us, rip through our bodies and minds, and heave and toss and contract our lives and loves as the oceans are heaved and contracted and rolled in their beds by the moon? What is this electricity that flows through us, charging us with dissatisfied energy? A thousand volts of something! Of what? Love, hatred, confusion, sex, compassion, fear, faith? Where does it come from? Like the oceans, are we contracted and rolled in our beds by mere gravity? But no storm lasts forever. The bad time too passes and we don’t know why. We look up one day and it is gone. There’s a different ebb and flow. Sunshine has returned and, with it, health – the confident grin, the innocence, the sense of being lovable. The ground beneath us quickens and steadies again, and the lies disappear, those of the child and those of the hawker. But we are left wondering.

Is this the way it will always be? A repetition, a perpetual rhythm: good times then bad, storms then sunshine? Ah, but there is more. Dimly we sense it both in the bad time and in the sunshine. Faintly, in both, a different kind of light burns. A curious light, no more visible in the darkness than in the sunshine; a surprising light for it should not be there, it goes against the rhythm. The difference is one word, an extraordinary word, Christ; at times, perhaps little more than a word. But it brings light; not much, to be sure, certainly not enough to take away the bad times, nor, indeed, to make itself visible beyond the sunshine. But it is a clear light: a beam, tiny, dim, but powerful; enough to walk a few steps by. It gives a different kind of steadying – hope. We don’t feel so foolish anymore.

There is a story told of a young boy who would persistently do vicious things to his classmates. His concerned teacher kept him after school for a talk.  In reply to her question: “Why are you always so difficult?” he answered, “I have two dogs fighting inside of me, a bad one and a friendly one. When the bad one wins, then I do bad things!” When the teacher asked why the bad one seemed to win more often than the friendly one, he replied: “Because I feed it more!”

That is a rich parable. The hardest struggle that you and I have in coming to community and celebration is our struggle with resentment, with the bad dog inside of us. We all have resentments, deep painful blistering hurts. They started when we were very little. We hollered from the crib and nobody paid attention. Left to ourselves, we began imagining things and the bad dog got his first feeding.

Then, as five and six-year-olds, they sent us into the jungle of school and playground where we were laughed at, excluded, bullied, passed over, misunderstood, not treated tenderly and found to be slow, fat, inferior, poorly complexioned, cross-eyed and not wearing the correct clothes nor having the right smarts.  By the time we reached adulthood we were already carrying a lot of hurtful baggage.

Adulthood brought new opportunities for growth, but also new opportunities for resentment and paranoia: All of us, despite close friends and loved ones, find ourselves regularly excluded, slighted, betrayed, missing out, taken for granted and made to feel inferior. As a result we grow resentful and begin to nurture an image of ourselves as a cheated and unloved person. Sometimes this resentment flares forth and we vent it on someone; sometimes we take it out on a scapegoat, some person or group whom we judge vulnerable enough to hurt without fear that they will hurt us in return; and sometimes it remains hidden, but we grow colder and more suspicious than we would like to be.

“Belive me,” wrote Henry W. Longfellow, “every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”  The end product is that we lose the Holy Spirit, that love between the Father and the Son which makes us feel like embracing others instead of hurting them.

Like the little boy in the story, too frequently we are under the influence of the bad dog…and we feed him! We nurse and nurture our resentments like a gardener trying to bring his prize rose to bloom. We magnify, re-examine, re-run, re-gurgitate and simply wallow in our hurts until we hurt all over and are convinced that nobody loves us and that everyone is taking us for granted. But that type of thinking leads us into deeper exile. We end up creating in ourselves a bottomless pit into which people around us can pour years of loving and kindness without results. Eventually there isn’t enough love in the whole world to satisfy us. Only forgiveness can lead us out of this and into life. But how do we move beyond our hurts and resentments? There is no painless, or quick, solution. It is a process of gestating and giving birth to forgiveness.

We need first of all to become pregnant with the desire to move into love and celebration with others. Then we need to gestate that hope, that holy spirit, into concrete flesh. It will be a slow organic process with its setbacks and its morning sicknesses but, if persevered in, eventually will lead us to the real labor, that of giving birth. The forgiveness which we gestated so warmly and tenderly inside of ourselves will not emerge into the outside world easily. Like a woman in labor, we will be forced into perspiration and tears as we scream in agony as forgiveness pushes though the birth passage in an attempt to come to light outside its womb. In the agony of birth, there will be those moments when we feel it isn’t possible, that the passage is too small to allow the new child to be born.

To vary the metaphor: In Tibetian Buddhism the bowl is the image for resentment. It contains all our bitterness, disappointment, hardness and disillusionment. We sit holding that bowl in front of us. We can either pour it forwards, allowing the whole resentful mess to flow away from us, or we can tip it the other way, allowing the poison to infect us. It is an important choice; perhaps the most important one we will ever make. The struggle between heaven and hell, between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of despair will, at least, not be centered on the flesh with its propensities of sex, laziness and passion. It will be centered on paranoia and resentment. We will make it or break it depending upon whether we can move beyond the resentment which poisons the Holy Spirit and makes us unable to forgive and move on to new life.

It is a staggering challenge; too much for us to do. To resent is human, to forgive is divine. But, casting ourselves into grace’s mercy, we must let divine help move us beyond ourselves. Our metanoia will lead to life; our paranoia to madness!

There is a pain among us as Christians today that is too seldom talked about. It is the pain of losing a loved one, not through death or even through physical separation, but through the loss of a shared common faith, religious practice and morality. Let me explain with an example: you are a parent trying to live out your Christian life in a conscientious fashion. You go to church regularly, pray, and basically live a decent moral life. When they were young, your children naturally followed you and shared your convictions and practice. Then gradually, or perhaps suddenly, they stopped going to church, stopped sharing your views on sexuality and marriage, and defiantly or apologetically began to live in a way that contradicts what you believe and practice.

At first you challenged and fought. You demanded that they go to church and live as a Christian sexually, but to no avail. Eventually, in frustration, you arrived at an unhappy truce: You continue to practice, they don’t. As a priest I have met literally dozens of parents (in half a dozen countries) who are anxious with worry about their children in this state. However this is not just limited to parents worrying about children. This pain affects us all, deeply. None of us have not felt the deep pain of loss when a son or daughter, a friend, or a brother or a sister, who used to walk beside us, no longer does.

One of the deepest bondings of all is weakened and strained. We are pained: both because we feel a sense of loss and personal rejection and because we are worried about the other’s long-term happiness and salvation as well as their long-term bonding with us. This pain is very common, very deep, and too seldom talked about. How should we react? What can we do as parents, friends, brothers and sisters? What can we do as the body of Christ?  Obviously we can pray and continue to live out our own lives according to our own deepest convictions, hoping to love and challenge with our lives more than with our words. This is what we must do….and, most times, is all we can do.  But it is important to understand what we are really doing when we are doing this. Something deeper is happening than is seen on the surface. What? In John 20:22, Jesus tells the earliest Christian community: “Whose sins you forgive they are forgiven; whose sins you retain, they are retained.”

In Matthew 16:19, he tells Peter: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.” The traditional interpretation of these texts takes their meaning to refer to the institution of the sacrament of reconciliation and to the giving of papal powers to Peter and his successors. They mean at least that much but much more is implied in these texts. What Jesus is doing here is giving the whole Christian community the power to forgive sins and the power of binding and loosing. What does this mean concretely?

It means that if we are truly members of Christ’s body then when we forgive sins, the person is forgiven. Likewise it means that if we love someone and hold them in our life, that person, regardless of his or her own actions, is not cut off from the body of Christ. If you continue to love somebody, they are bound. Hell is only possible when one has put oneself totally outside of the range of love and forgiveness of the Christian community, when one has rendered oneself incapable of being loved and forgiven in that she or he has actively rejected not only the religious and moral convictions of the Christian community, but, more importantly their love.

To make this concrete: If a child, or brother or sister or a loved one of yours strays from the church in terms of practice and morality, as long as you continue to love them, hold them in union, and forgive them, they are bound, still part of the church (because of your love). Irrespective of their official external relationship to the church and Christian morality they are in grace because you are part of the body of Christ and when someone touches you they are healed and forgiven, just as persons at the time of Jesus were healed by touching him. When you love someone, unless they actively reject that love, they are bound…bound to the body of Christ, sustained in salvation. And this is true even beyond death. If someone close to you dies in a state where, externally at least, he or she is not practicing as a Christian and is at odds morally with the body of Christ, your love and forgiveness will continue to bind them to the body and will continue to forgive them…even after death. To put the matter quite crassly: No one can go to hell if they are loved by someone who is within the body of Christ unless they refuse that love. It can be consoling to know that few persons will reject that type of love. It takes a strong person to go to hell!

Recently I celebrated the 10^th anniversary of my ordination. Ten years as a priest! A time for some reflection! I can say it out loud: They’ve been good years, full enough of giving and receiving. I have enjoyed the ministry and have been able to help some even as I have been helped by others. There have been too some incredibly special moments, depth moments clearly touched with transcendence, and I have also tasted sufficient agony. I’ve no regrets. My initial fears upon entering the seminary had centered around loneliness and boredom. Those two issues have been non-issues. The specters of pressure, over-intensity and burnout cast a much more threatening shadow. But I’ve survived, and survived with enough enthusiasm to hoist a few beers to celebrate the event and to look forward to the future. As I look ahead, I would like to offer a reflection to the Catholic community vis-à-vis its priests. Put quite simply it is this: Stop pressuring your priests to be less than fully human. Let me explain:

Roman Catholics still understand a priest too much in terms of his cultic role. There is undue significance given to the cultic powers a priest has to preside at Eucharist and other sacraments. Partly because of this the priest is too easily cast in the role of the tribal medicine man, the guy who can do magic and who has a ritual (‘hocus-pocus”) power which we do not understand and somehow fear. Like the medicine man he is respected and revered because he is, ultimately, feared. He is never genuinely loved, nor understood, because he is never perceived and accepted as being fully like us. Too frequently, with all but our very closest friends, we are made to feel out-of-the-ordinary, medicine men! More serious still is the Catholic community’s understanding of the priest as a relational sexual being. Bottom line, a priest is expected to act as if he were not a sexed male being full of erotic impulse and sexual complexity.  Please do not misunderstand me here: What I am pleading for is not that the Catholic community invites or condones erotic weakness and irresponsibility in its priests. Nor should it invite its priest to be “simply one of the boys.” The issue is one of accepting a priest’s full humanity, including his sexuality and the necessary complexity that follows from this. The priest need not be handed a license to be irresponsible, but he desperately needs to be handed the feeling that he is understood and accepted fully as he is, including his complexities and sexuality.

Unfortunately that is rarely afforded to us and, consequently, we must pretend….pretend that we are eunuchs. No eunuch can preach effectively to the full-blooded. That is why we are politely listened to even as it is taken for granted that we have nothing vital to say. In this area, a priest often finds himself in a no-win situation. If he seemingly understands life too clearly, including its earthier aspects of sex, eros and sin, then he draws the wrath and suspicion of the Catholic community (witness Andrew Greeley). Conversely, if he radiates the innocence and naiveté that the community demands, he is relegated to the realm of the insignificant; still allowed to do his hocus-pocus, but no full-blooded person turns to him for a genuine understanding or guidance. It is an interesting speculation as to why the Catholic community wants its priests to radiate naiveté and non-complexity. I suspect that is because, deep down, we are all afraid of our own darker side, our complexity (our shadow, in the Jungian sense). We deny this darker side in us and, somehow, if father goes through life pretending that no shadow exists, we can also more easily pretend it does not exist in us.

Finally, we tend to leave no room for our priests to be weak. I am not speaking here of weak in the moral sense, but weak in the way Jesus was weak and in the way any truly compassionate person is: vulnerable, not always together, emotionally wounded, over-extended and prone to cry very needy tears at times. We demand instead someone who projects that all is well at all times and who bleeds only ichor. If a priest shows emotional weakness, shows his own needs, or gets too involved in the lives and loves of those he is friends with and ministers to, he is suspect. And so my plea is this: Please don’t, consciously or unconsciously, ask your priest to dress in medieval clothes, to stay in the sanctuary, and to be so timorous so as to be unable to dare the perilous task of living. Let him be himself…complex, weak, sexed, masculine, involved, needy, and free not to pretend. Priests are tired of dressing in the clothing (psychological and physical) of senility while everyone is crying to be young; tired of living as eunuchs with no blood, sinew and passion. Small wonder nobody wants to join us!

We need, priests and community together, to risk some new directions. There are dangers involved, but, as Goethe once put it: “The dangers of life are infinite and safety is among them.”

One of the most precious of all experiences is being with a person when he or she is dying. Paradoxically, death clarifies so many things about life and the dying often generate community in ways that the living cannot. Today a group of us were with a young American soldier as he died. That group was a curious mixture of persons: A commanding officer with no church affiliation, an agnostic American doctor, two German doctors (of whose backgrounds I know nothing), a young American couple and myself, a Catholic priest. We were all there, for different reasons, to watch Sgt. Mark die.

Mark had been fatally injured in an accident two days previous and his life was being sustained by life support machines. The German doctors had now decided to unhook those machines since there was no longer any brain function and, according to German law, a person is then legally dead and a hospital need no longer use extraordinary means to sustain that life. His parents had been telephoned and had reluctantly consented to have the machines removed. They requested three things: that a Catholic priest be present, that an American doctor verify that Mark’s condition was truly hopeless and that Mark’s closest friend, a fellow GI in Germany, be present. The commanding officer gathered us and we met in his car on route to the hospital. It was awkward and strained. We were meeting each other for the first time, the situation itself was sufficiently tense, and we were very different kinds of persons.

The commanding officer was used to commanding and his attitudes and clothing showed it. The doctor was all business, talking of tests and legalities. Mark’s friends, Danny and his wife Patty, were in sharp contrast to the officer and the doctor. They were simple folk, casually dressed, religious and pious, down-to earth and very scared, praying and crying. However, they would soon enough show a courage which would help us all. I was the unknown priest, summoned for the occasion, not used to commanding officers or watching life support systems being turned off; also scared and praying. We arrived at the hospital where Mark lay; a boy of 22, in a foreign country, without his family, soon to die. The American doctor grimly checked the tests and retained that grimness as he nodded to the German doctors and to us. The German doctors approached me: “Jetzt – Should we do it now?”

I looked at Danny and Patty and we asked for some time to pray. The three doctors and the officer stood back. I clutched the book of rites and led prayers for the dying. Danny clutched Patty with one hand and Mark’s near lifeless hand with his other and we prayed like we’ve seldom prayed before: the prayers for the dying, the Lord’s Prayer, some Hail Marys. When we’d finished, Danny, a tall man (six feet five inches – most of it honest heart) put his head on Mark’s chest. He began to cry. I nodded to the German doctors; all business in their medical uniforms. Four or five turns of a valve and the machines stopped. It was as simple as turning off a heating radiator. When it was over, Danny’s tears stopped. Releasing Mark’s hand, he stood tall and pounded Mark’s chest: “Sgt. Mark, congratulations! You are the first of all of us to make it home! Goodbye!” He spoke the words loudly, with strength. Afterwards we walked from the room. Outside, through a glass paneling, we saw the German doctors slowly removing the machines and tubes. Danny, Patty and myself stopped for a last few Hail Marys.  Then we hugged each other, dried tears and walked to the waiting room where we sat to compose ourselves and to wait for the officer and the American doctor to finish signing forms.  There was a different atmosphere on route homewards. The commanding officer was less commanding, his tie was loosened considerably and so was his heart. The doctor now talked no more of tests and legalities, for we all talked of meaning and purpose in life. Danny and Patty no longer looked out of place in their denims and blue jeans. They clutched each other’s hands and the rest of us regretted only that for the sake of pride and proper appearance we were prevented from joining hands as well.

I was no longer awkward nor scared, and it felt oh so good to be a priest! There we sat, strangers, though not quite anymore, all so different, but now bound warmly because of what we had shared. Yes we sat now, seeing life and each other with a clarity and charity so seldom given. We had prayed for Mark and those prayers, I am sure, had helped him. But they had also helped us. It was a rare grace.

Congratulation, Sgt. Mark!

Zorba and Religion 070483

I am not sure how often I have read Nikos Kazantzakis’, Zorba the Greek. It is a haunting book with a strange power to ignite and excite in a mixed way. Most of us know the story. An intense, reflective, morally uptight and very cautious young writer meets Zorba. In him the young writer sees the key to celebration, freedom and joyful living. Zorba is a man who is totally spontaneous. He lives freely, loves freely, and sings and dances spontaneously.

No given to ponderousness and reflectiveness, he is also not given to heaviness of spirit or body. He takes life as a child, trustingly, without remorse and declares that the only truly unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is not to abandon in love (in some less acceptable version of that phrase!). The book haunts me because, measured against Zorba, most of us appear as emotional and psychological cripples, uptight, non-celebrating, very inhibited persons. Moreover recent studies have shown there is a direct co-relation between how autonomous a person is in life and how religious he or she is. The more people are autonomous, the less they are religious, and the more religious they are, the more they are unfree and inhibited. It would seem that religion and freedom are incompatible.

Where does that leave us? Abandon the Gospels for Zorba? Can Zorba challenge us to bring a higher synthesis out of Jesus’ message to celebrate, to abandon more, to be less inhibited and simply to take life and love less reflectively? Does Christian morality, if taken seriously, rob life of its richness and freedom? These questions haunt any reflective Christian. However there comes a point when the haunting must stop and some hard exorcism must take place because the philosophy of Zorba contains a fallacy, that of identifying pre-morality with genuine liberation. It confuses the mind of the child for the mind of the truly free person. That is a very subtle demon. Had it substituted anything else for true freedom its error would have been easier to detect. As it is, the book tortures a genuinely moral mind. Why?

Because it would have us believe that it is easy to celebrate and love and take life. It would have us believe that society’s rules, personal inhibitions and agreed upon standards are not important. In short, it would have us believe that we can live free as the birds, soaring, unencumbered by demands and expectations of others. Unfortunately, anyone who is even remotely moral experiences that this is not so easy, and is quite impossible in fact because as we try to share our lives in love and celebration without exploiting and raping each other, we run into an emotional, psychological, moral, sexual, and spiritual complexity that makes the studies of a brain surgeon look like elementary arithmetic. Only two types of persons do not know or respect this: the amoral-immoral (who ignore or flaunt the moral structure) and the pre-moral, the children, who are insufficiently developed to recognize morality.

When a child’s spontaneity and unchecked zest for life pushes her into uninhibited enjoyment, irrespective of the consequences, there are no elements of rape of others (because she is just a child) and we see the selfishness as being cute. What Kazantzakis proposes to us in Zorba the Greek is precisely that – the pre-moral actions of a child: cute, uninhibited, free, happy, but totally irresponsible in an adult. What masquerades as autonomy and celebration is the premoral spontaneity of a child. There is an immense difference between the spontaneous naive freedom of a child, acting happily, unaware of the consequences of its actions, and the true freedom of a moral adult. The latter must be sensitive to a moral and aesthetic structure which, because it respects everyone, induces constant hesitations, agonies, inhibitions, and frustrations in all those trying to love and celebrate. The kingdom of God can only come about when all of us can sit down at the same table and share food and wine, love, hearts, bodies, sexuality and spirit with each other. That coming together is not easy, as the cumulative frustration of mankind (not to mention our own personal frustrations) more than adequately attests to. It requires some elements of Zorba: spontaneity, abandonment, and a child-likeness which permits a simple enjoyment and is not paralyzed by an unhealthy frigidity and neurotic over-reflection. However it also requires a very “unchildish” discipline, respect for all others, chastity, patience and waiting.

A powerful and haunting piece of sculpture by Michelangelo is entitled: The Awakening Slave. It shows a body struggling to emerge from stone, to pull itself free. Part of the body is already clearly formed, the rest is still inchoate, hidden and imprisoned in stone. Few images capture as much the feeling of what it means to be human! Born as infants, we are helpless, with little self-consciousness, dependent, unable to speak, unable to really know ourselves and others, bound by countless limitations. In the moment of birth we partly emerge from the stone. The rest of our life is a struggle to be born further, to pull ourselves further free. But, very early, we sense that it is hard. We are so limited, in our intelligence, in our energy, in our psyches, in our emotions, in our moral abilities, in our relationships, and in our physical make-up. We push too hard and something breaks! There is only one place where we do not sense our limits, only one place where we can fly, free of stone…in our dreams.

In the kind of dreams that we dream in our ideals (not the kind we dream at night) we can truly dance, fly, love perfectly, be totally beyond our own and others’ limits. There are no limitations of energy, love, relationships or emotion in our dreams. There we can pull ourselves completely free from the stone and, then, turn around and look at our actual imprisonment. Unfortunately too many of us no longer dream. Dreaming is out of fashion. Realism, cynicism and despair are in vogue. To dream today is to be laughed at, ridiculed, to be regarded as naïve, childish and, ultimately, as pitiable. We see this, for example, in the common reaction to anything that is idealistic, romantic, virginal or contains the type of things we used to write poetry about. Nobody seems to be challenged be these things anymore to dream dreams, to push themselves into deeper and more special realms. Mostly these things are met with cynicism and disbelief, coupled with the urge to debunk and with the pitying condescension that we save for the especially naive. Kid’s stuff!

I am saddened by this critique. I have seen hopelessness, the lack of dreams, in 80-year-olds, in bad health, shunted off, unwanted, to die in auxiliary homes because nobody wants them any longer. It is justifiably hard for them to dream! But when I see, basically, the same hopelessness in gifted, beautiful, richly endowed young people with every practical reason in the world to be dreaming great dreams, I can only be saddened. Despair…and so young. Why? We’ve stopped dreaming. We have gotten sucked in by an un-virginal cynicism of an age that confuses despair with realism. We have stopped struggling and, bottom line; we have despaired that we can ever have a profound relationship, a real romance, genuine community, aesthetic love or full sexuality. Velief in them is like belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. That’s for kids! We have settled for what we can have, second best, and are cynical about any more idealistic realities. Those of us who are married are no longer trying to attain the optimum with our partner. We have settled for some less-demanding second best, or are looking elsewhere. Those of us who are celibate are no longer trying, with all the incredible tension this involves, to love genuinely, yet celibately. Our cynicism has declared that the ideal is impossible and so we become either a sterile old bachelor or maid, or we live a double standard.

All cynicism is despair, pure and simple. All refusal to dream dreams of something beyond is a giving up, a resignation to mediocrity, a self-imposed condemnation to remain partly unborn, in prison. Despair is simply the defeat of our dreams of greatness. Few things mire us as deeply in the stone as does our refusal to believe in the ideal. “There is only one real sin,” Doris Lessing once remarked, “and that is calling second best by anything other than what it really is, second best!” Moreover it is important that we do not just dream alone. Dreams need to be shared. What we dream alone remains a dream, what we dream with others becomes a reality! Pain and imprisonment result because people have no one to dream with. No person can cut themselves free of the stone by themselves. We achieve nothing truly in isolation. We need to dream and to share those dreams: Build dream castles in our minds, ideal loves and communities in our hearts. We cannot get fully out of the stone in fact, but we can in desire, in our dreams. They are the chisel which we can use to slowly cut away the stone and enable ourselves to emerge to further birth. Everything can be overcome if we dream. Through dreams we see the end of our exile.

Does all this sound like the ravings of an unrealistic dreamer? The naive daydreams and the wishful thinking of a young man out of touch with reality? The rantings of someone with delusions of grandeur? Perhaps! They are the dreams of a young man, a very idealistic one in fact. And, yes, he has delusions of grandeur! But they aren’t my dreams. You can read about them in the 17^th chapter of John’s Gospel.

In 1948 a young and very idealistic Trappist monk wrote the story of his own conversion. The story was classic: a young man, bursting with life and dreams, searches, desperately and intensely. He runs the gamut – booze, sex, jazz, art, writing, higher learning, travel, anything that can potentially offer respite to a painfully restless heart! He comes home empty, the thirst worse. He turns to God. The prodigal son comes home. In this case, to become a Trappist monk at the Cisterian Abbey at Gethsemani, Kentucky. Most of us read The Seven Storey Mountain. We met Thomas Merton there. But that was 1948. Merton changed, much else changed, in the 20 years until his death in 1968.

Most of us stopped reading Merton, except perhaps for a few of his more directly devotional treatises. We wondered what was happening to him. What we heard, mostly second-hand, left us uneasy. We heard he was struggling with his community, at odds with his abbot, was leaving or had left the Trappists, had neurotic problems, and was more interested in Eastern mysticism than in Christianity. The Trappists’ prize child, it seemed, had become their enfant terrible. Monica Furlong, in a recent biography of Merton (Merton: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1980), gives us a good look at the complex phenomenon which was Thomas Merton. It is a book I heartily recommend. It contains something for everyone. I say this despite the fact that the book has been severely criticized (and justly, so, I submit). For instance, John Eudes Bamberger, abbot of Genessee Abbey, Piffard, N.Y., who lived with Merton for nearly 20 years, contends that Furlong stylizes the facts to make them fit her own thesis, namely, that the Trappists stifled Merton and that he would have blossomed far more, both as writer and artist, outside of their monastic community. In the end, Furlong is out of sympathy with the monastic endeavor. She slants some of the facts accordingly.

Be that as it may, the book is a great one nonetheless. Furlong gives us a deep insight into Merton’s unconverted, prodigal years. She chronicles his struggles – his early rootlessness, the effect of his mother’s death, and his unsatisfying pilgrimage through sex, alcohol, and art – in a way which is far more honest (and thus ultimately more inspirational for us) than is Merton’s own autobiography which only hints in a generic way at his dark past. As such the book offers much to any heart whose restlessness has taken it down roads far from the Father’s house. Furlong’s description of Merton’s early struggles is good, honest, and interesting. It is, indeed, a description of Merton’s dark night of the senses. More interesting, however, is her outline of Merton’s post-Seven Storey Mountain struggles. The real mountain, for him, remained still to be climbed! The prodigal son who had found his way home had now to contend with the far less glamorous and more difficult task of remaining there – and finding there ways to express his energy and love. In the second half of the book, Furlong gives us an insight into the real grist from which Merton’s ultimate sanctity springs, his dark night of the spirit.

His struggle, as is evident, is not ultimately with his abbot, nor with his community, but is the struggle of the rich young man trying to enter the kingdom through the eye of a needle. And it is a love story, a true love story. Like all true love stories: In the beginning there is passion, in the middle there is much pain and doubt, in the end there is peace. Merton was a man gifted and rich in mind and heart. Talented and restless. After some prodigal years he turns up at his Father’s house – but he meets there not the glorified Christ of the resurrection but the Christ who is incarnated in flawed human flesh, in a concrete community. The love story follows, unglamorous but real: commitment, superiors, tasteless tasks, deadlines, community pettiness, narrowness, all interwoven with freedom, giving, dreams, and greatness. His heart pulls him on one way, his talent pulls him in another, his community pulls him in ways he would rather not go, and his God pulls him always. There is some giving and some taking, some good times and bad, some ulcers, some suspected neurosis, much frustration, occasional bitterness. He suffers, his community suffers; both grow. In the end there is peace, deep peace…with God, with his community, with the world community, and within himself. He made it! He sorted through the riddle. He found his way home from exile.

We can be helped by reading his story.